Internet Explorer Ends the Year with Market Share Losses to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome
January 01, 2009 |
Net Applications statistics tracking service has reported the December figures for use of internet browsers and the data looks to be very sad for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as it is losing its market share to all its major competitors – Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and the latest arrival – Google’s Chrome.
To be more specific, in December Internet Explorer lost a total of 1.6 percentage points and ended the month owning 68.2% of the market which is a drastic 10.4% decline in its share since December, 2007. Not surprisingly, the results demonstrated by other browsers are much more impressive: for example, Firefox crossed the 20% mark in November and continued growing to end the year at 21.3% of the market. Safari’s performance was the most impressive as the Apple’s browser increased its market share by 41.9% since the end of 2007 and now Safari owns 7.9% of the web browsing market. And even Chrome after leaving beta (probably due to large-scale advertising support by Google) now looks to be better able to compete with established players in the market as the Google’s browser completed December at above 1% market share. The only browser that remained stable was Opera as it stayed at the same 0.71% in December that it had in November.
The explanation of Internet Explorer losing its market share to other browsers is pretty simple and straightforward: in the months of November and December people browse the web from home much more than they usually do while normally office browsing dominates everything much heavier. So the fact that people browse the web looking for ideal gifts or actually buying them online from home changes the situation and gives additional advantage to browsers that are known to be personal choice for many compared to Internet Explorer which is traditionally a very office thing.
But even if this explanation is a valid one (which must be as non-Microsoft browsers are known to gain market share on weekends and holidays), this challenging period was the worst one for Microsoft in 2008: losing 3.1 percentage points in just the two last months of the year is much more than Microsoft’s browser experienced in the previous years.
Anyway one of the most intriguing story of 2009 must be that of Google promoting its Chrome browser. We have already seen advertising for Chrome everywhere and we will probably soon see the results of promised OEM deals for Chrome to be installed on newly-manufactured computers. Google must be very determined to distribute its own browser this year to demonstrate some significant changes in the web browsing marketplace and it will certainly be an interesting thing to watch.
